Arranging Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is very easy. Services like Google AdWords and Facebook advertising can be used by pretty much anyone who owns a website. Getting an account set up is fast and publishing basic text ads is simple too.
In fact, it’s almost too simple. When it’s so easy to set up a PPC ad campaign, many who are new to the world of online commerce head to AdWords first. Because it’s so easy, they use it as their primary method of attracting traffic. In the long term, relying on paid advertising can be very expensive indeed. It may work out a lot cheaper to build links, research keywords, and mount an SEO campaign, but that takes time and knowledge, while PPC doesn’t require much of either.
PPC advertising can work well, but it’s a mistake to assume it’s providing value for money when it may not be. Too find out if a campaign is delivering a good return on investment, the first thing you need is some basic math.
First, work out the dollar value of a visitor to your website. Any good analytics tool will show you the number of unique visitors per week or per month. Take the total value of your sales over that period and divide it by the visitor numbers. If 3305 different people looked at the site and you made $800 in sales, the average visitor spent 24 cents.
If you’re paying more than 24 cents per click, there is a problem. Unless the average AdWords visitor spent a lot more than the average organic visitor (very rarely the case), your paid advertising is costing more than it’s making. You can either hope things improve, try to reduce the amount you pay per click by choosing different keywords or lowering bids, or stop the campaign and try something else.
Calculating the value of a visitor is a good simple way of finding out if paid advertising is working, but there are complications. Firstly, the visitors you get through ads usually behave very differently to those who arrive as referrals from other websites or through organic searches. In almost all industries, visitors coming through organic search tend to stay longer on site, explore more deeply, and spend more than those coming through paid ads.
It is possible to look a little closer. You can segment out traffic that comes from paid ads and calculate the value of that kind of visitor more accurately. Divide the amount spent by AdWords visitors by the number of clicks to get the dollar value, or simply compare the amount spent on advertising to the amount you made if all your traffic is coming through paid advertising.
AdWords (and most other paid ad providers) and Google Analytics can offer a huge amount of information on who is doing what and the exact behaviour of visitors arriving through advertising. However, there is often no need to look too deeply. Stick with simple math- if you’re paying more than a visitor is worth, something needs to change if you’re going to make a profit.
Jess Spate is an online business consultant. She works for companies like Timeshare Secrets, an informational Marriott timeshare points resale site, and those that offer Wyndham timeshare for sale.
Search engine optimization or SEO if you like is a way of analyzing a website and altering it to become search-engine friendly so that the search engines can be able to easily read and index it. SEO is about customizing a website to get high rankings on the search engines. The reasons for high search engine rankings are obvious — when web surfers use the search engines to look for something, they rarely search beyond the top 10 results and as such, if a website is to benefit you, it needs to get rankings among the top 10, if not the first slot.
Even though SEO has been in existence for quite a long time now, it has gained popularity only in the recent past. This is due to advancement in technology where new tools such as use of Java applications, many images, and Flash require a website to be optimized so that the search engine spiders can read the site easily. Note that if the content of your website cannot be read by the search engines, definitely the site will not be indexed meaning it will not be available to your potential visitors when they look for it on the search engines.
Basically, the search engines have a very huge database that they maintain with information of all websites available. The information however is never listed on the search engine’s results page but they take the information into consideration when ranking websites. As such, a webmaster should ensure they optimize their sites to selected keywords and also when submitting the websites so that the sites get ranked. Note that if you use a set of keywords on your website, you should use the same in your submission tool lest you send mixed signals to the search engines and interfere with your rankings.
The right keywords can be obtained through thorough research. There are tools that can be used to identify the right keywords. They can give you data as to how many times certain words are searched by web users. However, if you use the most frequently used keywords, expect a stiffer competition.
The major search engines today are free hence you should take advantage and advertise your products and services for free, which you can do in as little as an hour. If you are not adept on SEO, you can always hire professionals to do the work for you. Even so, the internet is full of resources that can enlighten you on SEO, which is a good thing so that you cannot be left on the dark even as you hire someone.
The following are guidelines that can help increase the traffic that leads to your website:
Produce quality articles and submit them to article directories. If you want your website to gain more exposure, you may write several quality articles and submit them to different article directories. When submitting to article directories, always place your link right after your article or in the resource box. When planning to submit your articles to different article directories, make sure to spin the articles first before submitting to another. Avoid submitting similar articles to various directories. Otherwise, you will not get to increase traffic to your site and that you will not also be able to level up your rank in search engines.
Always ensure the effectiveness of the keywords you’ve chosen. Many people think that they should forever stick with the first keyword or keyword phrases they’ve chosen. But the reality is that the needs of readers may change abruptly and these changes can make their keywords obsolete. Another reason is that the initial keywords they’ve chosen are not attracting that much traffic. This is the reason why keywords must be checked every now and then whether they still are popular in the minds of the majority of the readers or not.
Concentrate on a single niche and create a blog. Subjects of websites can branch out to so many sub-niches, but sad to say, you can’t write about all of them. You have to make up your mind as to what niche you should focus on. For instance, if the products you’re trying to sell are cellphones and computer parts, you have to choose which one would you like to promote first. Once you have chosen a niche, start making a blog about it. When creating blogs, see to it that they have well-written and original contents so you can drive more traffic to your website.
Your website must be of high speed. People do not like visiting websites that take a while to upload. The speed of a website is actually included in the checklist of search engines when ranking websites. If your website is slow-paced, you might see it at a very frustrating spot in search engines.
Come up with appealing titles, contents, descriptions and tags. Make sure that your titles, tags and descriptions contain keywords that are in-demand among web users. Think of keywords that can catch the readers’ attention.
The most guaranteed way to get targeted traffic towards your website is ranking top on the search engines results page. But because there can only be one site at that coveted position for each search query, your being at the top is next to impossible considering the many sites available today on the cyberspace.
This however shouldn’t discourage you to aim to be among the top 10 in the search engine results page. One way that you can rise through the ranks is to have an article on each of your web pages containing at least 250 words and optimized to certain keywords as per your website. On the other hand, you can take part in link exchange programs. This is where you agree to display links of other members of the program in your website as they do the same for your link on their websites.
This increases traffic towards your site whereby if in a search query a site of one of your partners shows up and not your site, the web surfer will be redirected to the site. If the website of your partner does not contain what the web surfer is looking for, most likely they will click on the next available link in the website, which might just be your link. This explains the reason why it is important to only link to websites that are in the same niche as yours.
The other way to increase traffic towards your website is to participate in banner exchanges, which work more or less like link exchange programs. However, your website will need to have a lot of space to accommodate other banners. Writing or newsletters, articles, and press releases are equally great sources of increasing your website traffic. This entails simply writing very many articles to drench the web and in the articles there should be links embedded therefore that link to your site.
Having such articles on the cyberspace is just like having mini-sites scattered in strategic locations online. Through the articles, you can offer your readers a chance to subscribe to your newsletters which can as well translate to a sale if they accept your offer. If you wish, you can make your site more or less like Wikipedia, only that you will be selling products on each of your web pages while Wikipedia doesn’t.
This way, you will be guaranteed of a top ten position in the search engines on the internet. This will however mean a lot of work but if you really want to make good money, the hard work will be worth it.
If you want your business or website to survive competition in cyberspace, you need to learn the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is defined as the process of obtaining a high rank in search engines with the use of several optimization techniques, such as the use of keywords, meta tags, anchor texts, link building, article submission, content creation, and many more. All these SEO techniques are vital if you’re aiming to get a good spot in various search engines.
The first step that you should take in optimizing your website is to determine its most ideal keywords. Once you’ve determined your keywords, apply them in your contents. As much as possible, you should follow the keyword density that search engines require. You must also be aware that readers are more interested in reading brief yet valuable contents.
Every website owner’s wish is for be noticed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. This is why they familiarize themselves with SEO and its different techniques. Anything is possible to happen on the Internet. If you know how well how to optimize your website, you can easily get to the top. It is good to follow the techniques that other websites use, but it is better if you can figure out a unique way to successfully optimize your site. You have to bear in mind that you have to be able to keep up with competition and jumping into the bandwagon that most of your competitors are already into might not get you ahead of them. Find an SEO technique that is not commonly used by a lot of website owners and that you also believe is effective.
Here are some tips that can help with SEO:
1. Put meta tags on all your web pages. Meta tags are links that consist of your keyword or keyword phrases and a description of your website.
2. Place links that will interlink all your other web pages.
3. Avoid using URLs containing several numbers because search engines do not usually recognize them.
SEO involves a lot of processes, which includes building internal links as well as external links. Many website owners think that SEO is simple and that their websites can easily get a high rank in search engines, but it is not as easy as that as you got to have optimization skills, patience, time and determination. The absence of these qualities will take you to nowhere. However, do not worry if you do not know much about SEO since you can learn about it over the Internet.
